Re: critical issues

From:

Graham Percival

Subject:

Re: critical issues

Date:

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:18:39 +0000

User-agent:

Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 01:24:32PM -0000, Phil Holmes wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Graham Percival"
> >Ironically, although the current printed policy seems to be too
> >inclusive for Critical issues, my main concern is that bug squad
> >members are classifying stuff as High instead of Critical. It's
> >going to be a real downer if we suddenly discover half a dozen
> >Crittical regressions which were "hiding" as High issues after the
> >first release candidate.
>
> I think one of these was mine. This is the thing I want to discuss
> before creating a patch. I think the real problem over the
> definitions is what counts as a "regression". My definition would
> be "something that worked as it should in a previous version, and
> now doesn't work".
At first glance, that seems to be right.
> If we look at 1438, it would fail that
> definition - it's a change, sure, but the marking has moved, not
> disappeared.
Is the new position of the marking "working" ? Some markings can
be moved by some amount without making it "not work".
> TBH I was uncertain whether to add this to the tracker
> at all and only did so because I had a few attempts at getting views
> on whether it was a problem, with no response. I probably labelled
> it a regression, but possibly wrongly.
My thought process would be this:
1. am I certain that the new position is ok? If so, do nothing.
2. am I certain that the new position is not ok? If so, add it as
a Critical issue with a brief description of the problem.
3. am I not certain either way? If so, add it as a Critical
issue, but note that it may or may not be an actual problem.
In the case of #3, if it's not actually a problem, then when a
programmer takes a look at the issue, they can quickly mark it as
an "invalid" report. I agree that it would be nice if we could
find out about such invalid reports sooner (ideally before adding
it at all!), but the evidence is that we cannot rely on people
replying all the time.
However, priority-High is absolutely *not* a substitute for "it
might be critical, it might be, I'm not certain". Virtually
nobody will look at it, so we'll be stuck with a "maybe a problem,
maybe not" issue for the next few years.
Cheers,
- Graham